Promoting Leadership Principles in Product Management

Category Archives: Purpose

The word ‘habit’ generates different thoughts depending on your situation. For some it’s that thing they are addicted to. For others it brings to mind the things they’re not doing and invokes anxiety. For many in this audience, it connotes the path to accomplishment, the things they are doing—consistently—to move forward and create success.

For me, habits are an integral part of the processes I put in place to ensure I take the best actions and follow the right systems. For example, I love what exercising does for my body. Years ago, I developed the habit of running; I found things that make it enjoyable—e.g. listening to books and podcasts—that encourage me to keep doing it. Running has become a part of my life, a habit I enjoy that delivers positive results.

What would it take for you to achieve the change or to make the progress that deep down you’re seeking? How would you get started? Why does it matter?

The widely-held belief that success is available to everyone, simply with focus and hard work is one among many positive messages regularly reinforced in our Western culture.

But in my view, our “cowboy culture” also over-celebrates individual accomplishment, particularly in business. Too many romanticize the importance of a single individual’s ability to enable a big impact. This idea that denies the reality that teams of people, along with some good luck, always play big roles in enabling any company, or an individual for that matter, to register true success.

Titles have a way of morphing over time. In some cases, they improve and become more popular. At times, because of the acts of certain, often high-profile, individuals, titles can lose value.

When you think about the title ‘product manager’ how does it make you feel? Does it still hold the value it had when you first started learning about it? What about when you took your first job as a product manager—do you feel the same today as you did in those first days and weeks?

Today’s product managers wear many hats and are required to be motivators, counsellors, mentors, and enforcers. It’s difficult to balance competing job priorities and some leaders do a great job of truly engaging with their teams. And many others, despite their best efforts, manage to motivate the top performers but can’t seem to get the whole team rowing in the same direction. We found that to create a common goal, it’s vital to ramp up your purpose as an organization. Here, we will share from our book The Purpose Revolution: How Leaders Create Engagement and Competitive Advantage in an Age of Social Good how to develop and polish your team purpose statement.

Success depends as much on the desire of an individual as anything else. Hard work, persistence and intelligence also factor in, and depending on the endeavor, these may play a big role. However, without a burning inner desire, your chance of success is greatly diminished.

How do you channel your desires to successful outcomes? How do you turn your desires in to a burning purpose that will keep you going strong throughout your life?

Today starts a new year with new opportunities ahead. This time of year brings us to analyze what we accomplished in the past year and look ahead to what we want to undertake in the new year. It’s common to look ahead and set goals, or “new year’s resolutions,” for what we want to achieve.

The problem with this approach usually comes about two to three weeks into the first month. We get distracted and lose touch with what we planned for the year. By the time March comes around, the goals we set in January are long forgotten.